Columbus schools report due today

Columbus schools employees changed millions of student records. But years of data manipulation started to unravel with only 16 students.

Jennifer Smith Richards, The Columbus Dispatch

Columbus schools employees changed millions of student records.

But years of data manipulation started to unravel with only 16 students.

They were in front of county magistrates for truancy, but their attendance records were all wrong because someone had tampered with them. A judge nearly took a boy from his home when school records showed he had dropped out. But he had been going to school.

Finally, someone took notice. But it took the whistleblower, a district social-work supervisor, another year of persistence to get someone to listen. The district’s internal auditor began investigating in the summer of 2011. It was yet another year until then-Superintendent Gene Harris told anyone to stop altering students’ data.

That was in June 2012. By then, when sources told The Dispatch that the superintendent had held emergency meetings with principals to tell them to immediately stop withdrawing students, other students had stories, too.

A Marion Franklin High School girl said she had been effectively held hostage in her bedroom by her father, but no one noticed because the school decided not to mark her absent. An Eastmoor Academy boy was marked as having stellar attendance and given the OK to graduate even though he had been out of school and in a local center for people with developmental disabilities for months.

Students at Linden-McKinley who were failing courses found themselves, like magic, with passing grades.

All with the click of a mouse.

For the past 18 months, State Auditor Dave Yost has investigated the data manipulation, which made the Columbus schools look more effective than they were.

From the beginning, Columbus school officials decided to stay silent in public and say that they did not know whether data had been inappropriately altered but that they looked forward to the auditor’s findings. Throughout the investigation, district officials have issued reminders that they have no idea how much data employees changed or why.

“We don’t know what we have — if it’s a breadbox, if it’s a car-sized (issue). We don’t know exactly what we have,” Harris said in August 2012.

“We don’t know what we have here” was a common refrain, at least until new school-board President Gary Baker acknowledged this month that data had been manipulated.

Yost’s findings will be released this morning at 10:30, when he holds a news conference.

In June 2012, The Dispatch made public-records requests for hundreds of district computer files — mostly spreadsheets and databases. They showed that Columbus officials had wiped away 2.8 million student absences from the district’s computerized attendance records over about 51/2 school years. Some officials were responsible for tens of thousands of deletions.

The data showed that principals and others often waited until the end of the school year to retroactively withdraw students and delete their absences, saying they had left months earlier. Those withdrawals canceled out absences and low test scores.

By July of that year, Yost had stepped in to investigate, district internal auditor Carolyn Smith was in the middle of a probe and Harris had suspended a top-level administrator named Michael Dodds, who had made an inexplicable number of changes, even in schools he did not oversee. Shortly after that, Harris reassigned the man just about everyone said had taught them how to “scrub” student data: Steve Tankovich, the district data czar.

Yost’s office warned Columbus district officials against tampering with Smith’s investigation after Harris and Carol Perkins, at the time the president of the school board, were said to have pressured Smith to end her internal audit.

It would not be the last time Yost accused the district of interfering, intimidating witnesses or being blatantly uncooperative.

By fall of 2012, Smith had found that at least two Columbus schools still were altering data. Harris unexpectedly announced that she was retiring at the end of the 2012-13 school year, even though, just months earlier, she had said she had no plans to do so. And Yost announced some early findings in Columbus: In the 10 schools he examined, all had “unlawfully” withdrawn and then re-enrolled students.

District officials hired a lawyer and took a new tack: They implied that Yost was wrong and attacked the state rules that govern truant students.

“Are there control issues, is this sloppiness, or what?” Harris asked at a news conference called to debunk Yost’s early findings.

Though Yost said the district had enough information to take action, district officials continued to say they would wait for his complete report.

The FBI began investigating, too.

And by the end of the year, the internal auditor had found widespread student-data fraud. She announced her findings in December 2012.

The new year, 2013, didn’t bring closure. Even as Perkins decried the “flurry of negativity” that surrounded the district, Yost’s team had begun investigating grade changes.

The Dispatch analyzed district logs and found that hundreds of kids’ grades were changed, often by principals and assistant principals, and often from failing to passing.

Tankovich resigned. Dodds retired.

On a day in early May, convinced that they weren’t getting access to all the records they sought, auditors armed with warrants and escorted by police seized student records at most of the district’s high schools.

State report cards last fall show that, with investigators watching, the district would have dropped from a C grade to a D for the first time in many years.

Yost’s investigators served district officials with dozens of subpoenas. By late last year, it was apparent that they were seeking information about more than just grade-changing and attendance-scrubbing.

Yost described investigating the Columbus schools as pulling a string on a ball of yarn that just kept unraveling.

Auditors have asked about students who were marked as dropouts, students who were moved from 10th to ninth grade, students who were marked as graduates and then later as high-school seniors, and students who earned credit through the district’s online credit-recovery programs. They also have studied how Columbus conducted “count week,” the week during which student head counts are taken for state-funding purposes.

The report that Yost will release today is expected to wrap up the pertinent issues in about 100 pages.

Keith Finn, a retired data analyst who helped Smith examine the student-data changes before he retired, said yesterday in an email that he hopes for action against those who led, and participated in, any fraud. Tankovich, especially, deserves to be punished, Finn said. But he bristled at the idea that Yost’s report will bring closure:

“Not sure if there is any such thing.”

jsmithrichards@dispatch.com

@jsmithrichards

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.